Snowden fallout throws in stark relief US and UK notions of liberty

This article is more than 6 years old
Jonathan Freedland
In America, debate and outrage at the NSA spying revelations have hardly abated; in Britain – the Guardian excepted – the story has elicited barely a shrug. So what's going on?
Protest Against Government Surveillance In Washington D.C.
A protest board in front of the US Capitol building. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media
Published on Mon 2 Dec 2013 11.00 EST

Usually it's the United States that declares itself the exceptional nation, but this time Britain's the odd one out. While Europe, the US and much of the rest of the world have been shocked, shaken and otherwise gripped by the unfolding story of the NSA files, Britain has remained steadfastly unstirred.


In Germany, the notion of vast, unseen eavesdropping became a cause celebre even before the revelation that the NSA was monitoring the phone of Angela Merkel. This, after all, is the land where the Stasi is a living memory, a place still haunted by that Lives of Others era when privacy was all but abolished. Across Latin America, Snowden was big news from the very beginning.

Yet throughout this period the British political establishment – whether in the press or in parliament – has remained stubbornly slow to move. Media outlets were late to cover the Snowden revelations in much detail, initially preferring to leave the story to the Guardian, even though Britain's own GCHQ operation is implicated as deeply as the NSA. It took the intervention of the head of MI5 to get the majority of the British press to start paying attention – not, mind, to the role of the British security services in this unprecedented exercise in global Big Brother-ism but rather to the actions of the Guardian, accused of "lethal irresponsibility" for revealing it.

It was the same story when the intelligence and security committee convened a parliamentary hearing at the start of this month – five months after the story broke. Unprecedentedly, it brought the heads of the three intelligence agencies – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – into the daylight, answering questions together, in public and on camera for the very first time. But even then the standout moment was an implied attack on the Guardian, with the claim that the Snowden revelations had terrorists "rubbing their hands with glee", rather than an examination of how an agency of the British state came to be engaged in activities hidden from those charged with overseeing it.

What explains this contrast? An obvious answer is that Americans take privacy seriously. It's implicitly enshrined in the bill of rights, protected by the fourth amendment, which insists, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …"

Indeed, within days of the Guardian's first revelations, the American Civil Liberties Union had filed a lawsuit arguing that the NSA's surveillance amounted to just such an "unreasonable" violation of Americans' private realm (to say nothing of their first amendment right to free, unhindered speech.) The protection of Britons' privacy is not nearly so direct or entrenched. We have to rely instead on article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which has been absorbed into British law for little more than a decade.

But the centuries-old protections guaranteed by the American constitution are merely part of a larger, defining difference between Britain and America. Put simply, Americans genuinely believe their government is meant to work for them, that it should be their servant, not their master. The US constitution begins with a declaration of where sovereign authority belongs: "We the people."

Much flows from that basic idea. If voters are the boss, with the president merely an employee on a four-year contract, then every agency of government is meant to behave the same way: like a subordinate, doing only what it is told.


Britons have no such starting assumptions. The people are not sovereign here, they never have been. We speak of parliamentary, not popular, sovereignty. We are used to power flowing from the top down, from the centre outward, and most of the time we accept it. We act as if it's natural for the state to be in charge and it's an act of generosity when it deigns to let in a little daylight. If an arm of the state insists on total secrecy, that seems reasonable to Brits in a way few Americans would ever accept. It's not a natural instinct for Britons to see, say, GCHQ as their employees.
